On 2012-11-26, Chris Bannister <cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz> wrote: >> "Waste" is something that in itself has no value. But formatting has >> value added to the presentation. So it's a stretch to label html as >> "waste", before even discussing the significance of it. > > I don't see how an html email adds any value whatsoever to a post on > a software support mailing list. Au contraire, it is a PITA having > to deal with them.
HTML adds value the same way a large bold font adds value to the chapter heading of a novel, or the same way monospaced text adds value to excerpts of literal text within a technical manual. >> In the context for which you attempt to make an argument about HTML >> being wasteful, it's quite silly considering how much waste is >> inherent in a mailing list. Mailing lists distribute the full body >> of each and every message to each and every member -- who will look >> at the headers and decide what to read. > > With good trimming practice that, shouldn't be too much of a > problem. Trimming is insignificant with respect to the difference in content text to formatting text. Trimmed or not, the proportion of formatting text to content text is static. Again, you're stepping over dollars to pick up pennies when you disregard the comparatively collossal waste of wholly unread messages, vs. the ~1% of unread messages that would constitude unused formatting. > Remember, the whole point of the support mailing list's raison > d'etre is to provide support, so I think you are clutching at straws > when you start along that line. Clutching at straws would be to call a few key tags like "<pre>" "significantly wasteful" in a system that has copious waste by 2 orders of magnitude inherent in the design of the distribution. >> the tags -- something that actually adds value? The tags present >> in unread messages are dwarfed by the content in unread messages. > > You'll never convince me that an HTML message adds value, sorry. You're not thinking beyond yourself. An odd-man-out may not appreciate having an appropriate combination of both monospaced text and variable width text in a technical manual, but unfortunately for you, you cannot claim something lacks value simply because a single person (yourself) does not find value in it. You would have to convince us that *everyone* would not get value in it for it to not have value. I may not see value in a particular feature of a language (say a 72 point font), but certainly I realize that the feature may be useful to someone, and therefore "has value" (perhaps to elderly folks), despite me personally not getting value from it. >> One could perhaps make a case that the HTML tags are wasteful from >> the angle that they're not as short as they could be. But even >> then you're still stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. > > Dealing with waste in web pages, is an entirely, completely > different topic and no relevance here. I'm not even going to start > on the crap code that Frontpage produces ... cough, cough, sorry. I wasn't talking about web pages. Since you were not coming up with any reasonable rationale to consider HTML wasteful, I was giving you something that was better than the straws you were clutching at. But even this more plausible demonstration of HTML waste is still insignificant with respect to distribution waste. >> Moreover, text is highly compressible. So if you're keen to make >> perfection the enemy of availability, you should be on the fringe >> advocating for a binary format and a scheme that distributes >> headers only, until specifically retreived for reading. > > Some archives have gzipped monthly downloads, which is a good idea. > With regards to a binary format, I'm not sure if you are joking or > not, but It might be an interesting idea to force everyone to have a > pgp key compress every post and sign it, and if the signature > doesn't verify, reject it? No, I was not seriously proposing that as a reasonable way to combat waste. It would be foolish to introduce that kind of complexity and reduced availability to mitigate what you're percieving as "waste". But as I said, if you're keen to make perfection the enemy of availability... I would however support radical and fundamental changes on entirely different grounds. Waste would clearly have a back-seat, if it could manage to merit any consideration at all, with the primary goal being a means to: * mitigate spam * enhance anonymity * increase participation * mitigate centralized censorship * implement community collective scoring/ranking * empower authors to express better formatting in a way that is conducive to higher quality rendering
